“He speaks with a strong Angolan accent.”
“Ah, yes, about an hour ago, Excellency. Much the same question as your own.”
“Good, then I won’t have to warn him, Thank you very much.”
“It is I who thank you, Excellency.” He was about to put down the phone, but a sudden thought struck him. He said sharply: “Excellency? Did you say the Bocca do Inferno?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then you must warn him not to go near it till the wind dies down, Excellency. And you yourself...even from the land side, you must keep well away, you must obey the posted notices. I cannot stress too much the danger there now.”
“I’ll watch out, thank you very much.” I rang off.
So Loveless—or one of his men—had called. It was all working out very nicely; the long shot was paying off, as long shots have a habit of doing when careful thought makes them not as long as they might have appeared.
I wondered how much time I had. In case it wasn’t much, I ran fast for the two beach miles that lay between me and the Bocca; and when I got there, I stared in dismay at the huge spout of live water that was gushing up like a geyser way over the top of the cliff above me, a hundred feet up there over my head. Its sound was the sound of violent thunder, the awful fury of the gods that Loveless was fighting. It was obvious that I was never going to get into the Bocca from down here. The furious water was high over the only entrance. From the road at the top, perhaps? It was a terrifying thought.
I climbed quickly in the darkness up the track to the summit, stopping once or twice to stare at the huge spout that was exploding upwards with the force of a howitzer, not much more than a hundred feet or so to my left. I hurried along the clifftop with the help of the handrail there, closer and closer to the spout as it burst up every thirty seconds or so, and getting myself drenched with the falling spray. I hung onto a rail and waited, then dashed forward with the downfall of water and threw myself onto the top rungs of the ladder, grappling them like a limpet and waiting, tensing my muscles and hanging on with every degree of my strength, not a fiber of my body relaxed.
I braced myself for the next wave. It hit in thirty seconds, a great mass of water that came rushing at me from down below like an inverse waterfall. A stone caught up in it caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head and nearly knocked me out with the sudden sharp sting of it. I held on tight while the falling spout dropped back with a mighty, sucking pull, and then slipped down three more steps, counted the seconds, and waited for the next one. I wrapped my arms round two rungs and doubled up one leg round another, for this wave was going to be worse, far worse, than the last; I was in the chimney itself now, and could only guess at the strength of the mighty wave that would be funneling up there in a moment. I took a deep, deep breath, and bound the iron ladder to my body with arms and legs and will power. And it was a bad one.
It came roaring up at me again, preceded by a ghastly hollow roar that was a warning to hold on tight. I felt it going past me and sucking me up from my perch like a gigantic, wet, vacuum cleaner. The force of the water broke the grip on my left hand but not on my right, and twisted my doubled up leg round horribly. But I found the rung again, groping, and held my breath till the spout subsided, and then dropped down three more steps for the next one.
It was even worse this time. It broke the grip I had taken with my leg, and upended me violently, leaving me standing on my hands, gripping the ladder with both fists and with my legs flailing in the water above my head, sucked upward by a monstrous column of driven water. It was a gigantic serpent’s tail, thrashing savagely. My arms were being torn out of the shoulders, and for a moment I thought I couldn’t possibly hold on any more. For a moment, we held it there, the water and I, suspended in space as gravity slowly took over and the mighty waters began to fall again. I let go at just the right moment, as the wave began to suck me back, and I let it pull me down a bit more so as not to have my arms pulled out of their sockets, and then grabbed on tight to the lower rungs as they shot past me.
The wrench was painful, but bearable, and now, I guessed, I was out of danger. Four more steps, and I was under the overhang; the next wave was an impotent thing three feet behind me, with only the powerful wind of its passing to tell me that I’d never have survived in it. I stood at the bottom in the darkness for a moment or two to get my breath back, and then groped my way into the darkness inside.
The iron gate was still locked. Good. I clambered over it, squeezing painfully through the narrow gap and tearing my clothes on the barbed wire that surmounted it. It was pitch black now, and I wondered if I dared to use a light.
With the gate still locked? I thought I could. I switched on the tiny pencil beam of my penlight, and moved off down the long tunnel that led off deep into the recesses under the cliff. Here, somewhere, there was an underground lake, closed off many years ago when the Bocca’s quirks and tricks had become too dangerous for mortals. I groped my way along, clambered over the wet rocks, past the sign that said, unequivocally: Do not pass this sign; danger of death.
The tunnel was still wide and high; good. I found the first of the barriers, a roll of barbed wire that had been firmly tied to iron stanchions at the sides; it was still in place, but one end had been cut. I opened it just enough, went on and found the second, more formidable barrier; cut too; good.
I switched out the tiny light now, sat down in the absolute darkness, and listened long and carefully.
The Serpent’s Tail, Histermann had said; he had said too: all day to get the boat in...He couldn’t have meant anywhere else, his conscious fighting in his subconscious and neither one of them quite winning out, a mind sick with psilocybin groping in the dark on his native Barrier Reef where the Serpent’s Tail looks just like the fearful violent spout that blows up out of the Bocca; a mind groping around and trying to hide the truth, impressively, but not quite succeeding.
I wondered if Fenrek had ever been to Australia. Probably not. If he’d ever seen that Tail, he’d have caught on at once.
I listened a while longer; silence. I moved on.
There was a very narrow path along the dark underworld creek, so broken in parts that twice I had to enter the water, very deep here, and feel my way along. The rock had been carved by the constant wash of the waves into fantastic shapes, with weirdly molded boulders that were striped, in the thin beam of my light, in purples and yellows and sandstone reds.
I could smell the sour stench of bats now, and when I turned the light up to the high rock ceiling above me, I saw them there, a dozen, a score of them, clinging to protuberances in the rocky wall, upside down but still awake and waiting for the waters to subside and release them from the trap their home had become with the action of the Bocca. I could hear them arguing among themselves, squabbling angrily as they constantly maneuvered for space; one bat never likes to be touched at rest by another, and the space between them must be meticulously and mathematically accurate. I moved the light over and saw dozens more, a hundred perhaps, in the far recesses of the cave. They were horseshoe bats, the Rhinophulus ferrum-equinum.
And then, to my surprise—and I must confess to a shudder as well—I spotted a little cluster of Desmodontidae, the blood-drinking bat that so many people call the vampire, drab colored and small, not more than three inches long, without the nose leaf that always looks so repulsive, even though it’s harmless. The Desmodus, without that hideous leaf, is the one to worry about if you are sleeping in a damp cave by the beach. I wondered what they were doing over here in Portugal; they’re supposed to be native to Mexico. But, you can’t tell with bats; I once saw a Machaerhamphus, the Falcon Bat, in England, and that’s indigenous to Asia and Africa and nowhere else.
And now, the creek made an abrupt turn, and at the same place the ceiling dropped down to no more than six feet or so above the water. It broadened out into a small lake, blocked off from the main channel by a passage only ten feet or so wide, a small circular lake of placid water with a broad shelf running almost all the way round it, the famous underground lake of the Bocca that had been closed off and unseen for so many long, long years.
And that’s where, just as I anticipated, I found the boat.
It was rather larger than I had expected it to be, a twenty-five foot whaler with a raking stem and a sharp stern, with a powerful gasoline engine set amidships, rather further forward than it really ought to have been, close by the tiny cabin. The two masts, normally used for lug rig, had been removed entirely; whoever had done that had wanted a fast boat, and to hell with the delights of sailing.
The rock here was rock and nothing else, and it took me more than ten minutes to find any earth. But I found some at last, not much more than a handful; but sufficient for what I had to do. I wet the earth down thoroughly and pounded it into a reasonable facsimile of clay, mixed it up with my handkerchief, and plugged the engine’s exhaust pipe with it. I found a stick that had been washed in by the tides, and wedged the plug in as far as it would reach. I didn’t know how expert a mechanic Loveless might be (though I guessed he just might be very good) but I knew it would take him all the rest of the night to figure out why his motor wouldn’t start. And he wouldn’t be able to maneuver a craft that size out of the tricky cave with anything but engine power, even after the force of the Bocca had died down and opened up, once more, the channels that led to the open sea.
All night, and then some.
It was easier to go up the ladder with the water than come down against it, I took loose hold of the iron uprights so that the first of those terrible waves could shove me at least part of the way up to the top. But I underestimated its power.
With a fearful roar it hit me under my thighs, tore away my grip completely, and threw me up into the air like a ping-pong ball on a fountain spout. And when I came down and hit solid ground again, I was at the top of the cliff, dazed and bruised and wondering why every bone in my body wasn’t broken by the strength of the water or by the force of my fall; but I was where I wanted to be.
I bent myself up double, found the shelter of the gorse bushes, smelling sweetly now on the night air, and raced along the top of the cliff till I was sure that Loveless, if he were anywhere around (and I was sure he was, waiting impatiently for the Bocca to stop playing up) could no longer see me. And then I ran fast to where I’d parked the little bug, and started up.
And ten minutes later I pulled in outside the Alentejano.
CHAPTER 9
The hell with the ladies present; Fenrek said coldly: “Cain you’re a goddamn son of a bitch.”
The waiter was frowning at my very disheveled clothes, but he pulled a chair out for me all the same, largely, I suspect, because he was worried about my size. It’s hard to be six-foot-seven and not look as though you’re going to tear the opposition apart at the slightest pretext. I watched him sidle off to the Maître d’Hotel and whisper with him, and in a moment the Maître came over and bowed to the impossibly elegant Fenrek and said, not even hesitantly:
“Senhor, I am sure you will understand...If I could find you a better table? Perhaps a more discreet corner?” He smiled neatly at Estrilla, and then at Astrid, as though he thought we might want to roll on the floor with them in the middle of the fado.
I looked at Fenrek and spread my arms. “How the hell can I look respectable when I’ve been spelunking all night?” I turned to the Maître and said: “I’m terribly sorry. I fell into the ocean. Too much of your splendid Antigua, I never could hold my liquor very well.”
He accepted the lie graciously, and smiled with an expression that could have been called either benign or bloody patronizing, depending on your mood. But with the lovely Astrid there, and the lovelier still Estrilla looking so forgiving, I was in the best possible temper.
So, he smiled and said: “Then o senhor understands my predicament?”
